


i had a marvelous time ruining everything ❤

by sweetestsuffering



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:06:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26524183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetestsuffering/pseuds/sweetestsuffering
Summary: Jaylen Hotdogfingers used to be the lovable girl next door of the Seattle Garages, but now she's an undead blight on the entire League. Jessica Telephone has nothing left to lose and a little bit of a grudge.
Relationships: Jessica Telephone/Jaylen Hotdogfingers
Comments: 7
Kudos: 25





	1. Season 7, Day 100

Today, the Sixth Circle smells like ammonia and grilled cheese sandwiches.

The smells are not something Jess has missed. Foul and random odors roam Hades like storm clouds, and there’s little to be done about it. On the other hand, the Oven always smells cloyingly of artificial butterscotch. Nolanestophia always complains, says it gives her headaches. Says she misses the apocalyptic orange skies and ashfalls of Hades.

Jess doesn’t. She really doesn’t. If she never had to come down here again, she’d be happy.

But that’s not how things work in the League.

It’s the first day of playoffs and the Pies are in Party Time already. Jess can’t find it in herself to care this season, even if her involuntary delinquency is probably at the heart of her team’s poor performance. Any other season it’d tear her up to miss half her at-bats. Blaseball is in her blood, she cut her teeth on it, it’s all she knows.

It’s _half_ of what she knows. There’s the game… and her brother.

She should be in the Pies’ box with them, watching the first game, drinking champagne. Instead she’s in the back walkway, leaning off a railing that overlooks an abyssal chasm, smoking her fifth cigarette of the day.

“That’s bad for your health,” chirps a little voice from over her shoulder. Jess spares a glance in that direction. Persephone is five foot nothing, eighty percent curly mess of hair, and the scariest person Jess has ever met. Her fashion choices tend to broach unseelie in sensibility, but today she looks remarkably business-like in a green tweed jacket and pencil skirt combo, both woven of spring twigs and thorned rose stems.

“I’ve heard,” Jess replies, tilting her head back.

“He’s doing good,” Persephone says. Jess takes a deep breath that leaves a little sulfiric sting in the back of her throat. “He’s always had a quiet about him. They go easy.”

“Couldn’t be me,” Jess says.

“Oh, I know.” She can hear the smirk in Persephone’s voice. The fighters, they’re the ones Persephone and her husband like. If you don’t go gentle, you might end up in the Hadestown Menagerie, on display for their courtly denizens.

Or, you know. On their Blaseball team.

“But I thought you’d be glad to hear it,” Persephone says.

“Suppose so,” Jess says. “You smell grilled cheese?”

Persephone joins her at the railing, stepping up onto the lowest rung so she can match Jess for height. She does a pantomime of taking a deep breath. (Jess knows she doesn’t really breathe.) “Gruyere and cheddar.”

“Sebastian’s favorite,” Jess says.

“How sweet,” Persephone says. Jess isn’t sure what she means by this but she doesn’t care to ask. The managers never clarify. They never listen to complaints. Jess gives them anyway.

“I didn’t even get to see him,” she says. “After I got deshelled.”

“Bad timing,” Persephone agrees. “But it’s one of those random things. Nobody’s punishing you from on high.”

“Sure,” Jess says, and tosses her cigarette butt into the abyss. It’s still burning, and she can see it fall for a few seconds. But the little ember vanishes into the black eventually.

“Speaking of bad timing, I better go,” Persephone says. From the stadium, there’s a sudden uproar from the crowd. Jess honestly can’t tell if it’s delight or terror. It all starts sounding the same after a time. Before she leaves, she holds her tiny porcelain hand out to Jess. “Here, on me.”

Jess reaches out to accept the offering. It’s six golden pomegranate seeds, redeemable for six mixed drinks or six bags of peanuts at any refreshment kiosk. It’s a nice but thoughtless gesture on Persephone’s part.

After the goddess is gone, Jess considers chucking the seeds in after the cigarette butt, but she pockets them instead. Maybe she’ll pass them off to Hiroto or Zion. She suspects they’ll need the pick-me-up more than any of the Pies will.

Jess is considering lighting up again when she hears trouble coming.

Nobody around here wears high heels, because playing Blaseball in high heels would be idiotic. Persephone doesn’t even wear high heels, because she’s chronically barefoot, even when she shouldn’t be. So who’s clomping down the hallways in stilettos with the confrontational footfall?

Why, that’d have to be Jaylen Hotdogfingers.

“Got a light?” Jaylen says, all solicitous, as she leans up against the railing next to Jess.

“No,” Jess mumbles through her cigarette as she lights up.

“Don’t be mean, JT,” Jaylen says, leaning over the railing so that Jess can see her overdrawn pout out of the corner of her eye. Her lipstick is a very festive navy blue and extremely glossed. It might be the pettiest thought Jess has had today, but it clashes with the electric shock teal she’s dyed her hair.

“Go bum off someone else,” she says.

“I don’t want to,” Jaylen says. She has the energy of an unfed cat winding around its owners’ legs or a seagull-imp waiting to snap up a little scrap of stadium food. Jess can only hope her attention span is a little shorter than that. “I don’t even smoke.”

“Don’t start,” Jess advises. Genuine advice even for her worst enemies.

“Did you smoke when you were in the big peanut?” Jaylen prods.

“No,” Jess says. She didn’t do anything in there.

“Bet it would be an epic hotbox,” she says. “Maybe I’ll try it.”

Idolatry has not done this girl any favors, Jess thinks. She can’t bring herself to be bitter about her own high ranking. She’s good at the game. Support follows. Jaylen was popular even when she was alive, but the resurrection has brought with it _stardom_. Fame is a fickle beast.

Jess wonders what it was that changed her so much – the undeath, or the celebrity. It’s a little hard to say. She’s so altered from the girl she used to be, the girl Jess still remembers her as. Jaylen was an early loss. Jess remembers lamenting her incineration because…

Well, because she’d been so fresh-faced. At the outset the Garages were all these scrappy kids, some of them barely even twenty one. Jaylen had been especially young, uniquely talented. And… friendly. A rarer quality in the League than Jess realizes, sometimes.

Now she’s none of those things. She’s hardly even human anymore. And her inhuman qualities don’t come out in the familiar, gentle ways of some of the other League players. They’re wild, elemental, strange, paradoxical.

Jaylen is evil now.

Jess has met plenty of demons during her time in Hades. She’s got an eye for them.

“Hope you don’t have to try it,” Jess replies at length, tapping ash off her cigarette.

“You saying I don’t belong in the top ten?” Jaylen asks, back stiffening.

“I’m saying you don’t deserve it,” Jess says. She means to stand to go, then, to finally retreat to the Pies’ box and take the edge off. But her movements feel sluggish and stale compared to the lightning-fast speed with which Jaylen wraps her hands around Jess’s throat.

Suddenly, she’s suspended over the abyss. She hooks her foot around the railing, but Jaylen’s arm has become spectral and impossibly long, choking her out as she pushes her out towards the black. Multicolored sparks flicker across Jaylen’s skin, illuminating skeletal shadows within her. Her smile looks Cheshire-esque for a moment before the flickering lights obscure the demonic form within her once again.

“You’re not such a big star anymore, Jessica,” Jaylen says. “You should think about who you’re talking to… and maybe show a little _fucking_ respect.”

“Gonna kill me?” Jess chokes out. “You a killer now?”

This gives Jaylen pause. Jess sees the doubt ghost across her face and then disappear. For a moment, she sees such resolve in Jaylen’s smoldering eyes that she really does think she’s about to see her brother again.

But Jaylen puts her down.

“If I kill you it’ll be on the pitch,” Jaylen says. She blows a coquette little kiss before turning on her heel and sauntering back down the hallway.

That wasn’t a joke, it was a _promise_. The conviction was there. The restraint was _barely_ there.

It happens quickly, so quickly she almost doesn’t realize it _is_ happening. But Jess has three concurrent thoughts as she watches Jaylen go.

 _Someone has to do something about that girl,_ she thinks.

 _Nobody’s going to do anything,_ she thinks.

 _It’ll have to be me_ , she thinks.


	2. Season 7, Day 104

Tomorrow, Jaylen is pitching.

Tonight, she’s partying.

She’s an interloper in Partytime, but she feels like a welcome one. When you’re a professional Blaseball player you don’t really have any more control over your location than you do over the weather. You wake up in one stadium or another, you play your game, you go to sleep. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Jaylen woke up this morning at the Seattle Stadium, still named in her memory, and she’ll wake up there tomorrow too.

But right now, she’s on a party yacht in Biscayne Bay, and she’s fucking _trashed_.

The Dale throw epic parties, and as today’s games have wrapped up League players have slowly trickled in by their favored methods of interdimensional travel. Jaylen doesn’t remember how she got here; since her resurrection hours-long blackouts have become a regular occurrence. She just has to savor the moments she’s present enough to know what she’s doing.

“Fuckin’ dalé!” she yells as she throws another shot of tequila back.

This is met with a half-dozen cheers of _DAH-LAAAAAAY!_ from the Miami batters who are holding her up on a makeshift palanquin made of an empty keg. Jaylen almost loses her footing for how drunk she is and how stupid standing on an empty keg held by six drunk idiots is.

But she recoups, tosses her shot glass aside, and winds up the pitch that she was hoisted to this exalted position to make.

Pitching doesn’t cause her to _black out_ , exactly, but it does give a high like no other drug. She thinks she’s getting addicted to it and she doesn’t really care.

Her nerves are on fire, an exquisite burn that forms an itch like pleasure soon to be had but withheld. The ball leaves her hand, haloed by little sparks of aether. And as it makes contact with one of the giant peanut shells currently encasing an unknown Tacos pitcher, it makes a sound like thunder cracking right in your ear.

Nobody has time to flinch before the ball rebounds and smacks Bates Bentley square in the middle of the forehead. He drops to the deck like a bag of bricks, looking all to the world like he straight-up died. There’s a hush that falls over the crowd for a moment, but then he picks up his head – he twitches out of himself, a ghosted double, and when speaks his voice echoes on absolutely nothing at all, multiplied back at them for no reason.

“I’m okay,” he says, and the _kay kay kay kay_ is lost in the uproarious screams of the partiers.

Jaylen falls off the keg and Sixpack Santiago catches her by the waist.

“Careful there,” he says.

“Always am,” Jaylen replies, running her thumb along her bottom lip. She can see his interest in her, practically _feel_ it. Since she came back, she’s been able to sense these primal instincts in other people. Lust. Hunger.

Rage.

In fact, someone’s roiling anger is throwing her off her groove at this very moment. It’s louder and more persistent even than the dozen people on the boat who would fuck her in an instant if she gave them the chance.

Jaylen cracks her neck before turning on her heel to look at Jessica Telephone, newly arrived and brimming with bad vibes.

“You need a _drink_ , babes,” Jaylen tells her, and snaps her fingers. Someone hands her another shot of tequila in seconds. She offers it to Jessica, a Partytime peace offering.

“No thanks,” she says.

“You’re not playing.”

“You are,” Jessica responds.

Jaylen just knocks the shot back. She’s drunk enough that she doesn’t feel it anymore.

“Did you think that would work?” Jessica asks.

“What?” Jaylen says.

“Your pitching stunt.”

“Oh,” Jaylen says. She winds up and tosses the shot glass at a passing League player, who doesn’t even have a second to steel themselves or try to dodge. It shatters against their temple and their face erupts in a million tiny rivulets of amber-orange blood. “No, I didn’t.”

“Why bother, then?”

“Good fun,” Jaylen replies, smiling. “Try it sometime?”

“I have plenty of fun,” Jessica says.

“Oh, I don’t fucking buy that for a second,” Jaylen replies. Her thumb is on her lip again, this time of its own volition. Her mouth feels like it has more tequila than saliva in it right now. She can feel it heavy on her breath. “I remember pitching for you before games. Friendly practice, right?”

“Something like that,” Jess says.

“I think your own pitchers were all fucking sick of spending their free time watching you hit homers to empty stadiums, and that’s why you had to beg me.”

Jaylen watches Jess chew her tongue for a second. _Good_ , Jaylen thinks. _She’s pissed off. She’s not perfect._

Of course she knows Jess isn’t perfect, not really. But she’s felt that way for awhile, even watching her from the void. Golden Jess, beloved Jess. Favored by fans. Exalted by her teammates. Always getting better, never getting worse. Never losing it, like everyone else does, eventually.

“Don’t talk to me about fun, Jess. You wouldn’t know it if it bit you on the nose.”

Jaylen turns to leave, but Jessica follows her. She can feel all that burning rage on the back of her neck like real heat.

“Did you think you could crack it open?” Jess asks.

“I told you no,” Jaylen says. “Someone told me to do it and it sounded stupid and fun.”

“Maybe you were trying to help someone out,” Jess suggests.

“Out of the goodness of my heart?” Jaylen asks, drawing her mouth into an exaggerated pout. “You think you can _get to me_ , JT?”

Jessica doesn’t respond.

“You think you can cry and beg me to come back?” Jaylen asks. She reaches out and grabs Jess’s hands, puts them to her own cheeks. “Shake me and tell me you know I’m here somewhere?”

Jessica tries to pull away from her, but even if she’s putting all her muscle behind it, it feels like nothing to Jaylen. Jessica might as well be made of tissue paper. She could pull her apart in a second.

“Look at me,” Jaylen says, pulling her closer so she has to look her in the eye.

Jess does. She doesn’t flinch away, doesn’t even blink. Her eyes are hazel, flecked with brown along the outside edge. Jaylen’s are black and pupiless now. She’s spent hours looking at herself in the mirror, cataloging every change from the demonic to the minor. She knows her own face well enough to know what Jessica is going to see there.

She pushes Jess away from her hard enough that she hits the railing of the yacht.

“What were you hoping to see?” Jaylen asks.

“Fucking anything,” Jessica says. Her lip is pulling up in disgust. Her knuckles are white for how hard she’s clutching the railing.

“Sorry to disappoint,” Jaylen says. She feels something pulling at the edges of her consciousness, knows she’s going to black out soon. Prays she wakes up before she pitches her game tomorrow, but knows she probably won’t. “But you’re going to have to try harder than that.”

The last thing she remembers before fading into the darkness is Jess’s resolute little nod.


End file.
